Dune thoughts

 - military is key to all political power

- western modern humans domesticated

- harsh physical conditions of arrakis and salusa secundus kept raw edge of human physical capabilities

- breeding program which produced Paul and Leto II was the equivalent in psychological and political harshness to those two planets

Waters of March

A favourite video.Águas de março", pot Eli's Regina by TV Cultura Digital

https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FxRqI5R6L7ow&data=02%7C01%7C%7C34f862da8cda4a431b2208d6b0673e02%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636890354792743954&sdata=oRLsryGLJd8JGHVS%2BC3mo3WjDOcVNRC74U26JOF1lrQ%3D&reserved=0

I believe the video is from a Brazilian TV show, maybe recorded after the release of Elis' album in 1972 which contained this song.  The singwriter, Jobim, is playing the piano. The music is a duet between Eli's and Jobim.

Is a song of AUTUMN, March being the end of summer is the Southern Hemisphere. It is a "stream of consciousness" poem about death / dying
Songwriter: Antonio Carlos Jobim, 1972

Originally written in Portuguese and the English lyrics also written by Jobim

Wikipedia says " The lyrics and the music have a constant downward progression much like the water torrent from those rains  flowing in the gutters which typically would carry sticks and stones bits of glass and almost everything and anything" and " The orchestration creates the illusion of the constant descending notes much like Shepard's tones."

The cascading waters of March give the impression of the passing of daily life and it's continual inevitable progression towards death

A bird in the hand as a result of a stone in a slingshot, before a bird in the sky, then a bird on the ground.  ... a bird being killed by a slingshot, falling from the sky, landing on the ground, then being collected.

TRANSLATION BY MTG How - in YouTube comment.

Itks a stick, a stone, it's the end of the way
It's the rest of a stump, it is a little alone!
It is a shard of glass, it is life, it is the sun
It's night, is death, it is a tie, is the hook
It's the field's "peroba" (a type of timber tree), is the wood knot
"Casings", candle, is the "Matita Pereira" (striped cuckoo)

It is wooden wind, fall from the bluff
It is the deep mystery, it is like it or not
It is the wind blowing, it's the end of the slope
It is the beam, is te will, party ridge
It's raining rain is river talk
The March waters, is the end of fatigue
It is her foot, and the ground is the "roadless" March
Bird in hand, stone on the slingshot

It is a bird in the sky, is a bird on the ground
It is a stream, is a source, is a piece of bread
It is the bottom,, it's the end of the road
In face of the heartbreak, it's a little alone

It is a crowfoot, is a nail, is an account, it is a tale
It is a point, is a dripping drop
It's a fish, it is a gesture, is the silver shining
It's the morning light, is the brick coming
It is the wood, is the day, it's the end of the trail
It is the bottle of cane, the shrapnel on the road
It is the design of the house, is the body in bed
It's the stalled car, it's the mud is mud

It is a step! It is a bridge, it's a paddock is a frog
It"s the rest of the bush, in the morning light
Are the waters of March closing the summer
It is the promise of life, in your heart

A snake is a stick, it is JOAO, is JOSE
it is a thorn in hand, it is a cut foot
It is a step, it is a bridge, it's a paddock is a frog
It is a "Belo Horizonte", is a tertiary fever
Are the waters of March closing the summer
It is the promise of life in your heart

Engineer's Cairn, University of British Columbia, March 9, 1978

Me and my two Faculty of Science (Biology) bff's did this to the University of British Columbia's (UBC) Engineer's Cairn for the first officially celebrated International Women's Day in Canada in March, 1978.

Having lived in Totem residence for the previous 3 years,  I passed the cairn every morning on my way to the Biology buildings.  In all that time I had never seen anything but another faculty's letter painted on it - F for Forestry, A for Agriculture, mostly.  I believe we were the first to put a non-faculty symbol on this iteration of the cairn.

I don't remember whose idea it was, mine, Karen K's or Karen M's, but someone bought the paint and the three of us went out in the early hours of 8 March and did it.  The next morning, I was very disappointed to find the Venus symbol burned off.  Sure didn't take the Geers long to do it - a matter of hours!  I think we hit a nerve. Yay!

We were undeterred and two of us returned the next night to do it again.  We ran out of paint and Karen K decided to leave before it was finished, so there I was, alone at 3 am.  In those two nights, we only ever saw one person: a male, who said he was a security guard.  He said not much more than a caution to take care of ourselves - women out very late - we were always cautious.

I read now that this cairn was destroyed by the faculty of Forestry in 1988 and the Geers built a new one.  Is that one still there?  Where is it, exactly?

Rambling:
I believe there was only something like 3 female students in Engineering then.  One of my later roommates went into Engineering.

As for the 3 of us Biology/Zoology students, we all got our Bachelor's degrees, one went into Forestry for a bit, then finished her working life as a Coast Guard communications operator, one went into Dance, and I, after a couple of years working for government environment and parks ministries, have been kicking around doing volunteer science for decades - always focused on biology.  FYI all of us eventually got married, divorced, widowed (a weird mix of verbs and adjectives, when you think about it, and they aren't really that relevant to who we are) and two of us became parents (birth and adoptive).

When - the situation in which I grew up - girls were not encouraged to be interested in science.  Sure, my early interest in birds and astronomy was noted and they gave me a telescope for Christmas one year, (which I promptly took apart to study); but that was not made out to be a possible direction for my life.  My life was to be family and children and taking care of them.  But I was considered a little weird because I was not that nurturing or aware of other people's feelings, prone to day-dreaming, reading science fiction, watching Star Trek first-run, thinking "too much".  I believe it was my high school science teacher that worked on my parents to get me to university - a dicey affair not decided until the week before the application was due.


We learn of famous people, both male and female, mostly the celebrity type of fame.  And most of those are extroverts; most of the world is extroverted, apparently, so that's who we hear about.  But the average life is a balance and most are not famous.  Most introverts, such as myself, seldom toot their own horn.  And that's OK!  It's OK to be perfectly happy to do your own thing - as long as it doesn't harming anyone else (generally speaking, at least not directly; disregarding the unintentional harm we do to each other and Gaia, the earth, because of the cultural system we find ourselves in).  Let's look on "famous" people more as "inspirational" rather than something we have to be.  That is their life.  They did those things and some of those things were good.  You too, do good things, in your own way.

The internet gives introverts a platform, for sure, which is nice.  But, it's OK to be "private", too!  You don't have to share everything, every thought, every event.  (PS private and secretive are different).  A life is not a single focus.  A life can be family and music and gardening and crafts, and studying nature.  And science can be used in everything.

The theme for IWD this year is #BalanceForBetter.  I went through my Outlook Contacts and counted all the scientist / volunteer scientist I know by gender.  It was 50/50 female/male.  Right on.

Sometimes I forget

I forgot what I was going to say.

Missing words

Many words are missing in the English language.  What does this tell us? Things we value? How we think?

• Antonym for “mistake” - what is a single word meaning the opposite of  “mistake”? If I want to remind myself to learn not only from my mistakes but also from what I did right, how do I say that? If I WANT to make the same (antonym of mistake), what do I say/do?

Banish brooding

Hold your ... grandchild

How about try reading leGuin's stories and world presented in the book, 'Always Coming Home' with some symbolism and/or a different mind-set rather than literally.

Excerpt from 'Always Coming Home' by Ursula K. le Guin, 1985, Harper & Row, New York, NY, USA

"Towards an Archaeology of the Future

How the patient scientist feels when the shapeless tussocks and vague ditches under the thistles and scrub begin to take shape and come clear: this was the outer rampart - this the gateway - that was the granary - We'll dig here, and here, and after that I want to look at that lumpy bit on the slope . . . . How they know true glory when a thin disk slips through the fingers with the sifted dirt, and cleared with the swipe of a thumb shows, stamped in fragile bronze, the horned god? How I envy them their shovels and sieves and tape measures, all their tools, and their wise, expert hands that touch and hold what they find? not for long; they'll give it to the museum, of course; but they did hold it for a moment in their hands.

     I found, at last the town I had been hunting for. After digging in several wrong places for over a year and persisting in several blockheaded opinions - that it must be walled, with one gate, for instance - I was studying yet once more the contours of my map of the region, when it dawned as slowly and certainly as the sun itself upon me that the town was there, between the creeks, under my feet the whole time. And there was never a wall; what on earth did they need a wall for? What I had taken for the gate was the bridge across the meeting of the creeks. And the sacred buildings and the dancing place not in the center of town, for the center is the Hinge, but over in their own arm of the double spiral, the right arm, of course - there in the pasture below the barn. And so it is, and so it is.

     But I can't go digging there and hope to find the curved fragment of a roof tile, the iridescent foot of a wine goblet, the ceramic cap of a solar battery, or a little coin of the gold of California, the same, for gold rusts not, that was weighed out in Placerville and spent on whores or real estate in Frisco and then perhaps was a wedding ring awhile and then went hidden in a vault deeper than the mine it came from until all security proved illfounded, and now reshaped, this time round, into a curl-rayed sun and given in honor to a skillful artisan; no, I won't find that.  It isn't here.  That little sun of gold is not, as they say, dwelling the the Houses of the Earth.  It is in thin air, in the wilderness that lies beyond this day and night, the Houses of the Sky.  My gold is in the shards of the broken pot at the end of the rainbow.  Dig there? What will you find?  Seeds.  Seeds of the wild oats.

     I can walk in the wild oats and the thistles, between the houses of the little town I was looking for, Sinshan.  I can cross the Hinge and come onto the dancing place.  There, about where that Valley oak is now, will be Obsidian, in the northeast; the Blue Clay quite close to it, dug into the hillside, the northwest; closer to me, towards the center, Serpentine of the Four directions; then the two Adobes on a curve down towards the creek, southeast, southwest.  They'll have to drain this field, if they build the heyimas, as I think they do, underground, only the pyramidal roofs with their clerestories elevated, and the ornamented ends of the entrance ladder sticking out of the top.  I can see that well enough.  All kinds of seeing with the mind's eye is allowed me here.  I can stand here in the old pasture where there's nothing but sun and rain, wild oats and thistles and crazy salsify, no cattle grazing, only deer, stand here and shut my eyes and see:  the dancing place, the stepped pyramid roofs, a moon of beaten copper on a high pole over the Obsidian.  If I listen, can I hear voices with the inner ear?  Could you hear voices, Schliemann, in the streets of Troy?  If you did, you were crazy too.  The Trojans had all been dead three thousand years.  Which is farther from us, farther out of reach, more silent - the dead, or the unborn?  Those whose bones lie under the thistles and the dirt and the tombstones of the Past, or those who slip weightless among molecules, dwelling where a century passes in a day, among the fair folk, under the great, bell-curved Hill of Possibility?

      There's no way to reach that lot by digging.  They have no bones.  The only human bones in this pasture would be those of the first-comers, and they did not bury here, and left no tombs or tiles or shards or walls or coins behind them.  If they had a town here it was made of what the woods and fields are made of, and is gone utterly.  They worked obsidian, and that stays; down there at the edge of the rich man's airport there was a workshop, and you can pick up plenty of chipped pieces, though no one has found a finished point for years.  There is no other trace of them.  They owned their Valley very lightly, with easy hads.  They walked softly here.  So will the others, the ones I seek.

     The only way I can think to find them, the only archaeology that might be practical is as follows:  You take your child or grandchild in your arms, or borrow a young baby, not a year old yet, and go down into the wild oats in the field below the barn.  Stand under the oak on the last slope of the hill, facing the creek.  Stand quietly.  Perhaps the baby will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to somebody there, somebody from home."

There are several shifts in awareness one could overlay on one's thought processes to gain an altered understanding of this excerpt and thus the whole book:

1) imagine all of time at once:

• past, present and future existing at the same time
• time as non-linear
• yourself as a product of your past AND yourself being the seeds of the future
• time shaped like the heyiya-if with you in the present existing in the gap between the two arms, the Hinge and one arm being the past, the other the future

She hints at reading this way

• in the first line of the book: "The people in this book might be going to have lived a long long time from now"
• the heyiya-if is shaped like a galaxy, which we barely understand in space-time-gravity and all that 'higher physics'
• when she switches tenses in paragraph 4 above: "They'll have to drain this field"
• then she totally mixes together past and future in paragraphs 5 and 6
• "The only human bones in this pasture would be those of the first-comers"
• "Perhaps the baby will see ... or hear ... or speak to somebody there"

2) imagine the place she is describing is not a physical place but actually your own mind

• events in your past, your personal history, things that have influenced you
• the archaeologists of the mind - psychologists - examining your beliefs and how they were shaped = the shards, the seeds;
• the layout of Sinshan with this lodge there and that lodge here - the Five Houses of  Earth and Four Houses of Sky - representing those corresponding aspects of individual human nature and consciousness and collective thoughts and traits that allow us to live as a species in groups, For example
• the Obsidian as your feelings about the moon, or your monthly rhythms, or what you do at night
• the Blue Clay as the methods you use to cleanse your thoughts - your strengths, that part of your brain that creates motivation
• the Serpentine as the brooding stones you carry around with you
• Think of  how your brain feels and what part of yourself you are experiencing or sharing when you are:
• collecting food
• playing with the cat
• smelling a flower
• dancing
• talking with a friend
• being yourself and not being yourself
• taking part in a counseling session, or a seminar at work, kind of thing
• how you used to think one way, but now another
• your personality, at least the part you know

3) replace ideas with other ones and/or with symbols or archetypes

• the word "home" means "self" so that "see ... somebody from home" means seeing your true self or the part of you you are most comfortable with.  
• So, some examples (in brackets):
• "How the patient scientist (person undergoing transformation) feels when the shapeless tussocks and vague ditches under the thistles and scrub (the map of the mind, the psyche) begin to take shape and come clear: this was the outer rampart (major denials) - this the gateway (new thoughts allowing us to move forward) - that was the granary (food for thought)... and after that I want to look at that lumpy bit on the slope (a memory of an event). . . . How they know true glory when a thin disk slips through the fingers with the sifted dirt (the distractions from finding a truth) . . ."

Perhaps this mixing up of time, time as non-linear, is to get us thinking of what we are doing now to our home, the Earth, ecologically.

If humans as a species are to 'survive' our mess, they will have to have a different biology than ours, as a species.  I suspect, that as much as the socially-inclined disciplines of science may want to deny or ignore it, our basic biologically-evolved instincts are very much at the core of our individual and group behavior; and awareness of these instincts needs to be invoked in examining even our well-though-out motivations.

Take your child or grandchild, not yet a year old in to nature and try to see what they see, hear what they hear, or understand what they say.  We often say our children are our hope, and that we need to teach the children the right way to do things rather than the way we have screwed up.  Ms le Guin is showing us a peoples living a possible 'way-to-be in the world' that could work to help us stay in balance with nature, with Gaia.

And another thing: I don't think the Kesh deny their past. They just realize at a basic level of thought, an instinct even, that what humans did in the past did not work, was not very good.  The Kesh knew there was knowledge of technologies on their 'Exchange' (internet) that could lessen their labor but they didn't want to use it, had no need for it. The Condors did not know that, did not have that in their biology and social structure and so their heyiya-if was unbalanced.
 

I re-examine this because I have a grand-daughter now, and I desperately want to take her to a place she might be able to show me someone from "home".  ... What is "home", anyway?  Sometimes you choose 'home', most times you are a baby taken to the 'home' of your parents. Is home the 'place you grew up', or the place you feel most comfortable? It could be both. What is 'comfortable'? 'rooted', 'grounded', real, self-actualized? Mature enough to be able to recognize a place as 'home' and what it means to you?  A place where all is well? Then, yes, we do need to mature as a species to recognize the Earth as 'home'. I guess we just need a self-maintaining central electronic knowledge and data system, hehe. Maybe we better build that now, for The Kesh.